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Journalist, in poor health, is released pending trial

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(BIANET/IFEX) - 23 February 2012 - As reported on 22 February, journalist Dogan Yurdakul, detained defendant in the Oda TV case, was released pending trial due to health reasons by the Istanbul 16th High Criminal Court. Yurdakul, 66, is suffering from hypertension, heart disease and kidney failure. During his time in prison, he also developed diabetes and a cyst on his right kidney.

In their application to the Istanbul 16th High Criminal Court, the journalist's lawyers emphasized that Yurdakul was at risk of developing life-threatening complications that could possibly lead to his death, and therefore requested his release.

Yurdakul, who was a coordinator for Oda TV, was taken into custody at his home in Ayranci (Ankara) on 3 March 2011. On 6 March, he was arrested by the order of a court on duty and taken to prison.

Yurdakul spent 11 months in a prison cell with journalists Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener at the Silivri Prison a few miles west of Istanbul. At the ninth hearing of the Oda TV trial on 23 January 2011, there was an interesting conversation between Yurdakul and President Judge Mehmet Ekinci about the journalist's health condition.

Yurdakul had told judge Ekinci that he was taken to the Forensic Medicine Institute, where they decided to perform an angiogram. The judge, however, said that he had not received a report on the issue and would make a decision once the report was received. This was followed by a discussion on whether the court had the right to interpret a medical report.

Selcuk Kozagacli, the President of the Contemporary Lawyers Association (CHD), told BIANET that Yurdakul was severely ill and should be released from prison immediately.

After already cracking down on freedom of information in recent years, President Erdoğan has taken advantage of the abortive coup d’état and the state of emergency in effect since 20 July to silence many more of his media critics, not only Gülen movement media and journalists but also, to a lesser extent, Kurdish, secularist and left-wing media.

Authorities prosecuted a number of prominent journalists on terrorism-related charges, including the editor in chief and the Ankara bureau chief of the Cumhuriyet daily, who were arrested in connection with the paper’s coverage of alleged weapons shipments to Syria by Turkish intelligence services.

The report is a frank assessment of the recent regime of online censorship and mass surveillance against a backdrop of longstanding, serious abuses of the judicial process and attacks on freedom of expression by Turkish authorities.

The Turkish authorities severely restricted the right to freedom of expression of journalists and writers during and after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, English PEN and PEN International said in their joint report.

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